brk

But it is really about more than just the available pool of addresses.

Much of the IPv6 rollout challenges have been centered around routing and security. It's great that I can personally have (in theory) more IP addresses than I would ever practically need (and I am saying this as someone with 200 IP endpoints just in my house), but if I can't easily manage and control access much of the theoretical benefit goes away.

IMO, IPv6 solved the address pool size part of the issue, but it made managing the v4 to v6 transition very painful.

Same. One of my UPS accounts would up with about $300 of shipping charges for things that were very clearly not to or from me. Impossible to get ahold of anyone at UPS to discuss/dispute this. Just wound up creating a new account.

Seems to require Chrome? In Firefox it's just a text box, nothing happens. Was confused at first about what it was supposed to do, the rest of the page made it clear it was supposed to mess about with whatever text you write.

Trying it in Chrome and seeing the results I'm not sure that it is really that helpful. Has undertones of elementary school grammar lessons highlighting words in sentences.

To be clear, I was defending YC's investment in them, not Flock at their early stages. If you have spoken to Garrett in the early days you would have heard a much different vision than today.

In their defense, Flock didn't start off quite this way. They were initially offering a product geared to HOAs and private entities to help with simple violations and things like that. At some point they stumbled on this loophole of allowing LEO's to sidestep restrictions on collecting and storing this kind of data, and then it took off. They were well past the YC investment at that point.

(and just to be clear, at this point I think that Flock has turned into an anti-Constitutional threat to US Citizens and should be wholesale banned and put out of business).

This can only mean that IBM Clippy is next.

Sure, if you want to trust a cheap knock-off with no Apple logo.

I learned my lessons from cube chargers, not going to risk getting ripped off again with some no-name product.

I wish Messenger had an auto-reply feature: "I probably won't see your message for a while because I don't install Meta apps on my phone"

Bug or feature?

At this point the barrier for me to install an app is pretty high. If you're going to needlessly gate certain functions behind an app that work on a desktop browser (or could work in-browser), then I just won't use those functions. If by extension that degrades the value I get from your site, then I just won't use the site, and I won't be contributing to ADU stats you promote to advertisers.

Every single company has turned this into a situation where I cannot trust your apps with privacy or security, and the risk and hassle isn't worth the install.

Given Flock's behavior to date, I really don't consider the assumption that they could move to selling collected data to be a conspiracy theory.

We have already seen that data is a highly valuable currency. And investor-backed companies with unicorn valuations are pressured to extract as much value as they can. All things considered, I would say that Flock continuing to monetize access to their collected data in new ways is a foregone conclusion unless it is specifically stopped or prohibited in some way. On top of that, I would wager that it may be already happening in some low-volume ways.

Yet?

You have to admit, the precedent for them being a company that understands the sensitivity of this data has not been set.

Technically, most people came at it with no strong perspective. The pushback developed when it became undeniably clear the the devices were being abused, and there was no accountability. In particular, Flocks CEO has handled this extremely poorly.

I’m all for the positive use cases, and have been involved with several similar products, but in this case Flock has completely mishandled the situation and created the situation they now find themselves in.

For a relatively small battery like that, it's not going to last for days. In the typical outage where that battery would carry you, you can typically just leave the fridge closed and it will stay cold enough to prevent 99% of your stuff from spoiling. For most people (at least the US), it's not super easy to get at the plug in the back of the fridge anyway.

Running HVAC is usually more of a concern, especially in winter or peak of summer, and those aren't device that you can hot-plug, and a small battery wouldn't help there anyway.

I like the idea of whole-house batteries, but to really make it practical you're talking about thousands of dollars to the battery, install, etc. And you still don't have extensive run time, which is why I think you see most people still leaning towards permanent or portable generators way more than batteries.