was this a couple decades ago or so? i remember reading a blog about someone who implanted a magnet in the tip of one of their fingers and then put a chip in the skin between the thumb and forefinger.
You might be thinking of a blog called Feeling Waves. https://feelingwaves.blogspot.com That's where I heard about it too. He had magnets custom coated in some sort of Teflon like material. I ordered some magnets from him in 2009 but then couldn't find anyone who would implant them. I was living in Fargo, ND at the time and had called a bunch of tattoo and piercing shops as far away as Omaha and nobody would do it.
A few years later and I was living in Tacoma. I found a guy in Seattle, John Durante, who does all kinds of body mods. So I got one of the Dangerous Things magnets implanted in my finger. I still had those magnets from the blogger, but John wasn't going to install mystery objects into a client haha and he already had some magnets on hand.
Maybe a year or 2 after that I had moved back to Fargo. Somehow I came across a guy, Ian Bell, out of St. Cloud, MN who also did some more extreme body boss. He implanted the NFC chip in my hand. Later on I had him implant a magnet in each ear, in the tragus. The idea with that was I could wear a coil necklace hooked up to an audio jack and I'd have implanted headphones. That didn't really work. The magnetic field is much to weak. It did work if I held the coil up to my ear, so that was a near trick, because the audio was audible from a few inches away. The magnets in my ears were stronger than the magnet in my finger, so I was able to hang paperclips off of them and that was a fun party trick. The ear magnets had to be removed after several months because the casing had cracked and the magnets were disintegrating, causing my ears to swell and hurt. I forgot what the magnets were coated in, but it was a different coating than the finger magnet; the finger magnet is still in there and fine today.
The magnet removal sucked and I was dumb about it. Only one bothered me at first so I left the other one in there. Well, the 2nd one started to bother me a bit later and by the time I was like ok I should get this taken out, the only person within 1400 miles who would do it was out of state. So I went to a walk in clinic and explained the situation and I'm pretty sure they thought I was crazy. They scheduled me for a surgery that was a couple of months out and I had a vacation to Australia coming up. I ordered some scalpels off Amazon and tried to DIY. I couldn't do it. I asked a friend, and she couldn't get it either. At this point my ear was swollen, discolored, and had some scalpel cuts. So I flew to Australia with a messed up ear. I tried to meet up with the owner of a piercing shop in Sydney who Ian had hooked me up with but he was in Perth while I was in Sydney. Suffered for the next month. Got back home. Ian cut it out.
I typed all this on a phone and I'm not going to proofread it. Sorry
drop bear => Already said Koala. but if you type it before you say koala the answer drops from the top of the page. so many great easter eggs. got 92 in the end
I entered plankton, which technically isn't an animal and so it rejected it like any other random word, but then after I lost it offered me a link to the Wikipedia article on plankton. Very thoughtful.
This is amazing. Many years ago I started a similar project that but with a more traditional word search style. This one is much better as I couldn't get the interface the way I wanted. Congrats!
I see they have a subscription and it requires an app. Does the app require an account and all that jazz or can I just use it without giving away anything?
Which is better than Flock's "Transparency" Report. I live in WA, ex-Flock employee, and in my County, half of the agencies with Flock agreements are not on their Transparency portal.
And at the very least - why can't you search the Transparency Portal? You have to try each and every agency name. Let's try https://transparency.flocksafety.com/ ...
<Error>
<Code>NoSuchKey</Code>
<Message>The specified key does not exist.</Message>
<Key>index.html</Key>
<RequestId>[redacted]</RequestId>
<HostId>[redacted]</HostId>
</Error>
> And at the very least - why can't you search the Transparency Portal? You have to try each and every agency name.
Was it different in the past? It seems like it'd be beneficial to Flock and their customers to make obtaining this information as obtuse as possible, while maintaining the vaguest appearance of "transparency". If they could charge you $10 per search, they probably would.
As an aside - can I ask why you left Flock? I assumed that the people who would've wanted to work there would be fully invested into the idea. What changed your mind?
> As an aside - can I ask why you left Flock? I assumed that the people who would've wanted to work there would be fully invested into the idea. What changed your mind?
The Flock of my recruitment process would be a lot less problematic. There was discussion of the obvious, the surveillance "state". But everything was a high ground of ethics and legality, ideas were supposedly run through groups to discuss "not just whether we could, but whether we should", protecting individuals whose data was collected by Flock but had no safety or LE purpose, retention, sharing controls ...
... the reality was much more "mask off". "Eliminate all crime, using Flock". Very Airbnb'ish. "We know your jurisdiction doesn't allow you to share this data. It's not our job to enforce that on our platform; if you're sharing it, that's not our concern - you'll still have access to all the tools to do so." Sales worked with Agencies who weren't allowed to gather data themselves, weren't directly allowed to partner with Flock for cameras, were asked where they saw or believed they'd most want said cameras, and Flock would aggressively work with businesses, HOAs, other government entities in those areas, and get them onboard, and then go back to the Agency saying "Hey, guess what, we know you're not allowed to collect this, but these customers are, and you're able to share their data."
That didn't sit well with me - there was nothing actively illegal Flock were doing, but they were openly helping Agencies flout the spirit of laws constraining them while staying within the letter (in the above examples, HOAs and others would often get deeply subsidized, at least, installations, knowing that Flock would be able to get a bigger contract with an Agency that would otherwise have no over very limited means of working with them).
These things, coupled with Garrett's "vision" that, he emphasized repeatedly, was his literal vision, "Eliminate all crime with Flock", were too much (and I think lead to some of their even more troublesome initiatives now, like "Have AI look for potential suspicious vehicle movements, even without a reported incident, and have it alert officers to go investigate in realtime", with talk of that being extended to conversations and audio).
I live in a county where the county seat is <15k people (<40k in the entire county). There are two camera locations listed on deflock - four cameras total, since they face both directions. In the past month, I’ve discovered an additionally six locations (twelve cameras), all of which show signs of having been very recently installed.
I went to add them to Deflock, but their process requires an OSM account. I wasn’t able to do that on the side of the road, and haven’t gotten back to it yet.
About 40k new cameras each year from what I have seen.
If you find yourself with some time, there is now a DeFlock app that helps with mapping. It also includes locations where people suspect there might be a camera, though that is limited to about a third of the states so far.
That’s true, but the article also explains it isn’t nefarious; she had a stalker (after past horrible trauma), and was terrified, so replaced the live audiences with extras. It just happened to work so well it caught on and became a mainstay of sitcoms after that.
The Academy Awards can’t even trust the extras to fill empty seats in the audience, so they use lawyers and accountants who have already signed NDAs with the Academy for their day jobs.
