this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2026
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Not sure if EMP is practical, but a small drone with a laser requires much less power and wouldn't do the camera's sensor any good. A drone with a can of spray paint could also cause problems. So I hope no one does either of these.
With all the cameras being re-patriated by good citizens, I'm sure a number of them already made their way to skilled hackers, tinkerers.
And given how amateurish Flock was with their most recent PR event (a reporter tried to attend, got rejected almost last minute, Flock even went behind his back to cancel his hotel booking, so our guy went full out and with a metric fuckton of RF equipment, monitored the event's signals. WiFi, Bluetooth, wireless mics (which they often left on and just broadcasting out into the wild), I have a feeling that the whole Flock ecosystem is riddled with security issues.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's some incredibly dumb stupid kill switch built into the firmware that can be triggered by something as simple as an ESP32.
What about a drone with a can of thermite
Okay, but seriously, who has enough rust just sitting around to make that shit? You're like the third person I've seen talk about thermite, and that shit is ridiculous to make.
Then you have to go through all the trouble of somehow igniting the thermite and getting it away from your drone...
The same can really be said for a can of spray paint. I want to see someone actually design that shit before I'd believe it's possible. Maybe someone with a lot of tinkering time, but not the majority of us just trying to buy parts from a hobby store.
Doesn't take a whole lot. Visit a local auto shop and ask about the buildup around the brake rotor lathe.
I wouldn't have thought of that as a source. I was thinking along the lines of having to manually mortar and pestle (well, not an actual one, because they wouldn't do metal) rusted hoods and such that you could yoink from a junkyard. That would actually be harder nowadays, with all the plastic and not-iron/not-steel metals being used in cars.
I used to work at an auto shop. We "accidentally" put a hole in the concrete floor by taking the oxyacetylene torch to a crushed soda can and a chunk of rusted metal shavings from the lathe. We absolutely knew what we were doing. It was glorious.
Amazon dot com.
Exactly where every enterprising vandal should source their highly specific weapon of destruction...
It's literally just rust and aluminum powder in a 1:1 ratio
Drone with a water balloon full of paint. Aim for the solar panel.
Block the panel, the batteries don't charge, the camera doesn't work.
What about a satellite with an array of nuclear weapons? Thermite is such overkill, and risks harming the surroundings.
Good idea, if we blot out the sun with nuclear winter they can’t recharge.
Why not just build a star-destroyer drone and aim it at the sun? Then Flock can't just wait it out and rebuild.
That's a good point, but what if some remnant of humanity survives and rebuilds on another planet, and one of the survivors remembers having seen a flock camera? We should destroy all matter in the universe. Or find some way to accelerate heat death?
For the latter, could I suggest building a very large fridge and putting the universe inside it? We can attach it to a drone if that helps.