"DeFlock runs on Open Street Map, an open source, editable mapping software. He began posting signs for DeFlock to the posts holding up Huntsville’s ALPR cameras, and made a post about the project to the Huntsville subreddit, which got good attention from people who lived there. People have been plotting not just Flock ALPRs, but all sorts of ALPRs, all over the world.

“I’ve become good at spotting them just because I’m kind of subconsciously always looking for them,” he said.

“I want everyone to be aware that this is happening. And I don’t think I can change people’s minds—some people will be fine with it. But some people won’t be,” he said. “And hopefully enough people won’t be fine with it and will do something to get them taken down [in their city] or at least better controlled, preferably taken down.”

When I first talked to Freeman, DeFlock had a few dozen cameras mapped in Huntsville and a handful mapped in Southern California and in the Seattle suburbs. A week later, as I write this, DeFlock has crowdsourced the locations of thousands of cameras in dozens of cities across the United States and the world."

https://www.404media.co/the-open-source-project-deflock-is-mapping-license-plate-surveillance-cameras-all-over-the-world/

#OpenSource #Crowdsourcing #Surveillance #LicensePlateReaders #ALPRs

#USA #Taxes #TaxEvasion #TaxAvoidance #Inequality #Billionaires: "Billionaires are pretty confident that they can't be taxed – not just that they shouldn't be taxed, but rather, that it is technically impossible to tax the ultra-rich. They're not shy about explaining why, either – and neither is their army of lickspittles.

If it's impossible to tax billionaires, then anyone who demands that we tax billionaires is being childish. If taxing billionaires is impossible, then being mad that we're not taxing billionaires is like being mad at gravity.

Boy is this old trick getting old. It was already pretty thin when Margaret Thatcher rolled it out, insisting that "there is no alternative" to her program of letting the rich get richer and the poor go hungry. Dressing up a demand ("stop trying to think of alternatives") as a scientific truth ("there is no alternative") sets up a world where your opponents are Doing Ideology, while you're doing science.

Billionaires basically don't pay tax – that's a big part of how they got to be billionaires:"

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/15/piketty-pilled/#tax-justice

#AI #GenerativeAI #Philippines #WageSlavery: "The mathematical models underpinning AI tools get smarter by analyzing large data sets, which need to be accurate, precise and legible to be useful. Low-quality data yields low-quality AI. So click by click, a largely unregulated army of humans is transforming the raw data into AI feedstock.

In the Philippines, one of the world’s biggest destinations for outsourced digital work, former employees say that at least 10,000 of these workers do this labor on a platform called Remotasks, which is owned by the $7 billion San Francisco start-up Scale AI.

Scale AI has paid workers at extremely low rates, routinely delayed or withheld payments and provided few channels for workers to seek recourse, according to interviews with workers, internal company messages and payment records, and financial statements. Rights groups and labor researchers say Scale AI is among a number of American AI companies that have not abided by basic labor standards for their workers abroad."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/08/28/scale-ai-remotasks-philippines-artificial-intelligence/